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I'm sure you know youtube can use a non-flash player using <video> ? Granted, non evey video is available with it, but...

thats the problem all videos with advertisement in it are not availible or a special sort of advertisment text-boxes or so dont know exactly minitube is very resource-cost-efficient and plays more videos aperently not all at the moment because google changes always the non-official existant api of it.

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Probably you want to see something and Adobe has measured that this isn't year of Linux

there isn't much growth happening within the Linux desktop market. "So, with Desktop Linux, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 1%. And since the release of AIR, we’ve seen only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux."

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The only AIR client I've ever used was the Pandora client, but they have a good-enough flash player in the browser anyway.

AIR is little more than the Flash platform running in a desktop window, anyway. And they only ever supported 32-bit, and there were frequently issues with sound not working, and missing libraries. Gee, and you wonder why so few people downloaded it? Maybe because you didn't provide platform-native installers (deb, rpm) with 32-bit and 64-bit support, and keep up with platform changes?

Adobe really has no idea how to distribute software for Linux. And what frustrates me the most is that they still (in 2011) think that 64-bit support is exotic or a luxury, when in fact it's the norm (moreso on Linux than other platforms though).

Other than the performance speedup in computationally-intensive code, it's stupidly easy to tear through 4GB of virtual address space in a 32-bit process. Ever wonder why people hate 32-bit Photoshop so much? Because open a few big images and Photoshop blows the 32-bit VAS and comes crashing down. Flash isn't quite so RAM intensive, but if you have complicated apps running inside it (spreadsheets etc), it could be.

Adobe is mismanaged by people who would drop support for their own dying mother in exchange for some money. This is simply not how you behave as a top-tier software development company. Supporting all the major platforms out there isn't an option; it's mandatory. You eat the cost regardless of how many people you have on that platform.

I don't care about AIR in particular as a platform, so I won't mourn this loss, but I still think that Adobe's management style of "get a lot of downloads for your platform or we will stop supporting it" is completely unprofessional. Especially if they market the platform as a cross-platform solution for years, and suddenly pull support for one of the major platforms.

This just proves that big red doesn't understand how free/open source software works, at all. Linux isn't just another platform; it carries with it the necessity of understanding a completely separate development methodology. Adobe seems incapable of grasping this, so they drop the platform instead. Amazing that such a large company can learn so little about a completely open community over the course of a decade.

If this is the beginning of the end of Linux support for Adobe's other products, such as Flash and Adobe Reader, I say good riddance. We didn't need your 32-bit buggy shit either, Adobe! No one will care about your insignificant little company when Flash is obsoleted by HTML5, anyway. Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft -- those four companies are all heavily invested in HTML5, and HTML5 is the Flash killer. Adobe: If you want to commit suicide, then please go ahead and die!

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"Adobe is dropping the Linux desktop client so they can focus on mobile platforms such as Android".....
And of course, Android **IS** Linux, so running the Android client on any other Linux shouldn't be too much trouble... unless they release ONLY ARM blobs. In which case it would obviously be necessary to run the stupid thing in the android emulator.

Are they really so lazy that they can't build it for Linux?

Oh well.... its just another bullet they've decided belongs in the middle of their brains. Won't be missed by many.

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"Adobe is dropping the Linux desktop client so they can focus on mobile platforms such as Android".....
And of course, Android **IS** Linux, so running the Android client on any other Linux shouldn't be too much trouble... unless they release ONLY ARM blobs. In which case it would obviously be necessary to run the stupid thing in the android emulator.

Are they really so lazy that they can't build it for Linux?

Oh well.... its just another bullet they've decided belongs in the middle of their brains. Won't be missed by many.

Android doesn't use any of the desktop APIs though.

Desktop GL? Nope.
VA-API? Nope.
X11? Nope.
Xv? Nope.

Even if you could run the ARM binary in a linux-elf-arm-EABI to linux-elf-x86-64 binary translator (a la ndiswrapper), it wouldn't work at all with desktop technologies. AFAIK you can write a native NPAPI plugin for the Android browser, but that's where the similarities end.

Still, if they exclude desktop Linux from the Flash 11 release train, I would rather use wine and some hacks to run the Windows Flash plugin for Firefox inside of a native browser window. The good news is that we already have the binary translation technology we need to run a Win32/PE executable on Linux; we don't have the tools needed (outside of qemu or bochs) to run an ARM binary "by itself" on x86 Linux. We don't have an ARM emulator (that I'm aware of). And even if we did, no one has proposed integrating the Android APIs into the standard Linux desktop.

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Blam! 5% here! With a steady increase too, no less.
How did they gather those figures*? Don't know, don't care, merely throwing in random pretty tables and graphs that will support my points. Anyone can do that, try it! It's fun!

* Yes it's only for the w3schools website and they're more likely to attract developers, just bear with me on this one.

But, to quote Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester, “There are already 100M Linux devices, it just so happens they’re running Android.”

Yet the Netmarketshare data pins Android at 0.76% share. That would put the total market size in terms of units at roughly 13.15 billion. Remember those are computing devices on which users actively consume web services, so no servers.
World population is close to 7B http://www.prb.org/, of which 1.2B live in developed countried http://www.unfpa.org/pds/trends.htm, let's round that up to 2B to include parts of developing countries where life standards are high enough to matter here.

Over 6 computing devices per head? Please tell me my math is completely off, because something doesn't add up here. A desktop, a laptop and a mobile, both at work and at home?